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| M.C. Escher Nocturnal Rome - Church Domes 1934 wood-engraving National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Nocturnal Rome - Trajan's Column 1934 wood-engraving National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Nocturnal Rome - Santa Francesca Romana 1934 wood-engraving National Gallery of Canada |
ROME
You lived through two great epochs, proud capital.
The emperors adorned you, and the popes;
And all roads led to you, and all men heard of your glory
And bowed to your power;
And you borrowed the robes of beauty
And crowned yourself queen of the world.
Then Bernini came
And over you flourished his wand.
And straightway coiled and knotted draperies covered you
In volutes and curlycues.
Your jewels he bartered for paste,
Your brocades for shoddy,
And all his baroque followers made a mock of your beauty
With bombastic outcries and gesticulations.
Then at last, only yesterday,
Came young Italy to crown your dishonor
With her enormous and too-imperishable Monument.
Yet still, under the stuffs and the uproar,
One may rediscover your majesty –
In marble ruins,
And stern old medieval churches,
And renaissance pictures done in the grand style.
– by Harriet Monroe (1860-1936), published in 1929 in Poetry, the magazine she founded and edited. Despite their self-image as arts revolutionaries, pioneer Modernists like Monroe carried forward a good deal of Victorian aesthetic baggage. Sneering at the Roman Baroque had become a dead cliche by the time Monroe was putting it on paper in the Twenties. But she was not wrong about one thing (and one that has never been disputed by anybody) – i.e., the stupefying ugliness of the Victor Emanuel II Monument at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, began in 1911 and completed in 1925.
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| M.C. Escher Nocturnal Rome - Dioscuro, Pollux, Piazza del Campidoglio 1934 wood-engraving National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Nocturnal Rome - Santa Maria del Popolo, Piazza del Popolo 1934 wood-engraving National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Nocturnal Rome - Small Churches, Piazza Venezia 1934 wood-engraving National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Rome - Between St Peter's and the Sistine Chapel 1936 lithograph National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Rome 1927 woodcut National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Still-life and Street 1937 woodcut National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Sicily - Cave Dwellings near Sperlinga 1933 woodcut National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Sicily - Temple of Segesta 1932 wood-engraving National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Sicily - Selinunte 1935 woodcut National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Sicily - House in lava near Nunziata 1936 lithograph National Gallery of Canada |
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| M.C. Escher Sicily - Mummified Priests in Gangi 1932 lithograph National Gallery of Canada |